Sector(s)
The Marin County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services Prevention and Outreach Team engaged Promet Source in a discovery workshop, followed by the design and development of a new website. In addition to providing direct support services, the team leads the Marin County Suicide Prevention Collaborative, launched in response to the county’s February 2020 suicide prevention strategic plan. Managing more than 30 contracts with community-based organizations, Prevention and Outreach conducts advocacy, training, and education in the community to create greater awareness of and access to Marin County behavioral health resources and services.
Prior to the launch of this new site, the Prevention and Outreach team's resources were buried deep within the Behavioral Health and Recovery Services site. The critical, high-stakes mission of the recently-formed team, required that resources be prominent and easy to access.
About the project
The team’s objectives were multi-faceted, centering on the creation of a comforting community hub, that fueled awareness of and interaction with the full scope of available services, resources, events, and community connections. Also essential was a flexible CMS platform that could be richly and easily expanded upon by members of the existing Prevention and Outreach Team, who would not need to reach out to the IT department or touch the underlying code in order to do so.
While the primary audience was youth, the site needed to appeal to and engage with a diverse demographic that included all ages, multiple ethnicities, the entire socio-economic spectrum, as well as caregivers and mental health professionals.
The new site’s UX allows for access to all resources directly from the home page. Resources are presented in meaningful categories that include Suicide Prevention, Parenting & Families, Schools & Educators, and Mindfulness & Self Care.
All critical hotline phone numbers are displayed prominently on the home page, and repeated again prominently on the footer. Within every section, opportunities to get help are highlighted.
A script-like font on the home page, along with rounded corners on the photos and a contemporary UX, contributes to a comforting, human touch.
Why Drupal was chosen
All of Marin County's Health and Human Services websites were already on Drupal. The technology systems coordinator for Marin HHS, who currently manages 40 Drupal sites for the county, cited advantages of Drupal that included:
- Extensive contributed modules and contributed code which allowed for far-reaching possibilities,
- Drupal's "unparalleled freedom and relative ease of use for content editors," and
- The fact that not using an open source option such as Drupal would have required "tens of thousands of dollars in licenses just to get started."
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Provus leverages the latest drag and drop page-building tools to enable non-technical content editors to update pages as needed and take ownership of the site.
- Drupal Views enables content editors to select from a simple list in Layout Builder and pull in content.
- Taxonomy is an essential driver to the site’s functionality enabling visitors to find resources and events, while allowing for powerful capabilities for connecting and classifying content.
